My first rant - please…be gentle.
I hate my cable company. They do not offer Turner Classic Movies; we must make do with American Movie Classics. Heh.
I hate it that they consider RoboCop III a “classic” movie. They constantly run real “classic” movies - “Laura”, “Leave Her To Heaven” and “Miracle of the Bells” being the most recent examples - at 5:15 AM, and leave the dreck like the aforementioned RoboCop and “MacArthur” for prime time viewing at 8PM.
It just sucks.
That is all.
VCNJ~
They offer AMC and not TCM? That’s like a steakhouse offering spamburgers but not KC strip. AMC has commercials, fercryinoutloud. Call your cable company daily and demand to know why TCM isn’t available. If you don’t get a satisfactory answer right away start imitating old movie stars’ voices every time you call. Somewhere between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Stewart they’re bound to give in just to make you go away.
I used to love AMC - then they started the commercials crap AND had the balls to run self promos declaring themselves to be the channel for people who loved movies! During the movie!!!
I watch TMC now and never check out AMC. Gee whiz!
AMC used to run ads between the movies. That wasn’t too hard to take. Hell, I could even forgive ads during the movie (maybe) if they inserted them at appropriate breaks in the action (betweeen acts) and left the formatting alone.
But no: They put ads in wherever the hell they want with no consideration at all for whether it breaks the flow of the film. Plus, they edit the films for content, running time, and screen format.
I hate them, too.
BTW, VCNJ, you might want to consider getting a dish. I did it 15 years ago and never looked back.
You don’t say what cable company you are with, but if it is like mine (Comcast), TCM is only available with a premium cable service package. I have standard cable, and don’t get TCM, but if I paid the extra $12, I get it, along with several other channels.
AMC had something like “Volcano” on last night, that pathetic Tommy Lee Jones movie with eruptions in downtown LA. WTF?
AMC has also been showing Death Wish 3 a lot, the Charles Bronson sequel. Now I could even understand Death Wish 1, which was a pretty influential movie in the '70s. But Death Wish 3?!?
We didn’t get TCM back home in Miami, but we have it here, and I love it. I was watching HAROLD LLOYD movies last night! I couldn’t believe how cool that was.
AMC is an interesting example of de-evolution in practice.
When it started up, it was, for all practical purposes, TCM, before there was such a thing as TCM.
However, over time, its programming choices changed, and changed, and changed some more, until it became what it is now- utter crap.
I miss the good old days of AMC, too.
I mean I was surprised when My Bodyguard was shown - but it was a very good movie, so I could accept it.
But the other day, I was looking at the TV listings, and they were offering Jaws 3?
ewww.
Hey, you may have problems with AMC, and those problems may be valid, but to denegrate Robocop is just plain wrong. Next thing I know you’ll probably start putting down Batman.
For shame.
I was told that AMC’s decline was a result of the expansion of cable channels. In their glorious early years, the Bob Dorian days, they had a pretty substantial library of old films from all the major studios. Ted Turner has his own classic movie channel now, so he shows the old movies to which he owns the rights on TCM instead of licensing them to AMC. There is also now the Fox Movie Channel which apparently shows the older 20th Century Fox films. Then, too, there are the Encore Mystery, Western, et. al. channels, all of which have schedules that lean heavily toward older movies. AMC is basically left with drek. It’s too bad, too. In the 80s and 90s AMC was one of my most favorite stations. I miss Bob Dorian.
I was flipping through the other day, and saw that AMC was playing Lionheart, starring Jean Claude Van Damme. Is that the best they can do? Lame.
Me too! And Jazzbo Collins!
I was flipping channels late on Friday night and came across some strange movie. It was a 50s-era Japanese movie of the Godzilla type, except the monsters in this movie included a 50-foot teenage caveboy and some sort of evil lizard. I watched in bemused fascination for a few minutes, until the first commercial break. Then I realized I was watching AMC.
I thought to myself, “It’s not American, and it’s definitely not a classic. Even the description ‘movie’ is a stretch.”
Nobody said anything about Robocop. The anger was directed at Robocop 3.
That sounds an awful lot like Frankenstein Conquers the World, a perennial favorite on such local TV shows as Pittsburgh’s Chiller Theater. AMC, historically, did show cheesey monster pics from time to time, especially around Halloween. It’s a dirty, dirty shame that such drek now forms the bulk of their programming.
Please, won’t someone remove AMC’s feeding tube? I can’t stand to see it like this.
Oh, it’s worse than that. They were doing a three-fer of Van Damme movies. Classics, indeed. shudder
The only thing AMC has going for it is that one extremely rare occasions it will air an interesting original documentary. Back while the channel was in the process of eating itself it had more original programming and at least two original series. Remember WENN I believe one was called, about life at a radio station in the 30s, and The Lot which was centered at a 30’s era movie studio. I have some vague memory of seeing a couple of good fashion documentaries and a few other choice things but, while I still have AMC as a “favorite” channel on my cable box (meaning that it’s on the click-through channel list) I can’t remember the last time I actually watched anything on it. I won’t watch movies edited for television, and while I could put up with the commercials between movies the last straw for me came when AMC edited the word “shit” out of Fright Night. It was the first time I’d come across one of the channel’s TV edits and with much sadness I wrote them off. This was before they started breaking into movies, which I detest and won’t put up with.
I agree…I also liked the ORIGINAL comedy Channel…
I was working an outtage at Ginnea in ROchester NY, and had the overnight 12 hour shift, so I was at nome during the day. They were still so new they only had 8 hours of programming, they showed it 3 times in a 24 hour period. They had ‘Stand up, Stand up’, and other shows like that, and would show comedy movies, and some short flicks [they had an absolutely hysterical short I wish I could find again - an old woman, and an old suitor having dinner, with an old butler…and apparently this ‘dinner’ party was an annual event where when they started it back in the 30s she would do all 6 or 8 of the original men, and then as they died off of old age the butler would substitute for the missing men…very situational, you sort of have to see it as the butler changes clothing details and changes to different cheesy accents as he substituted for the different men]
sigh My definition of classic movies is 30, 40, 50 with occasional forrays into 20s silents. The original AMC lineup=\ and I loved when they showed the filler stuff, like the swing ‘videos’ and the newsreels. I used to have fun taping ‘saturday matinees’ with a cartoon [usually a betty boop, the cab calloway stuff rocked] a couple of newsreels, an a-list movie, then a few more cartoons and newsreels then a b-list movie. Was a great way to spend time when there wasnt anything on TV. I would try to make them all from about the same year. 
IMHO, AMC’s first big mistake was believing its market research. That showed that viewers didn’t like black and white films (PHILISTINES! HERETICS!). So poof they started cutting back on good bw flicks replacing them with mediocre color movies.
Then “research” told them viewers wanted to see newer movies (WHO WERE THESE “VIEWERS”???) so the term classic came to mean “anything that has been out more than six months.”
By the time Turner and Fox came along with their own channels, they were just kicking the corpse after it was already dead.